185
Researchers just discovered a massive 'jacuzzi bubbling with almost pure hydrogen' — a lucrative source of clean energy
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2024
185 points (94.3% liked)
Technology
59534 readers
3195 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Clean until you use a bunch of equipment to get it captured. The hydrogen might be carbon free, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a carbon footprint.
Convince me otherwise, but the only green hydrogen is from renewable energy powered electrolysis.
Clean until you use a bunch of equipment to get it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I just put mine in a jar and leave it in the sun for a few days.
Evaporation isn't the breakdown of 2(H2O) --> 2(H2) + O2 (hydrogen and oxygen) like electrolysis... It's just water molecules overcoming the intermolecular force and not wanting to be liquid anymore, H2O(l) --> H2O(g), still just water and sadly no good as a fuel.
It was a joke. Besides, the jar obviously has a lid! I wouldn’t want to be wasteful.
What's the carbon impact of your lid though?
Well, it’s made of carbon—so, 100%?
What a coincidence, my perpetual motion machine works on lids
Well, a lid only needs to be screwed once. Let me get you over to our personal healthcare department. I can think of a few things I need to have screwed perpetually with no energy waste.
Hydrogen, released directly into the atmosphere, interacts with methane and increases it's half life. And since Methane is 50x more powerful as a greenhosue gas than CO2... that's bad.
When you "burn" hydrogen, on the other hand, you're converting it into water. Which is obviously harmless.
So, capturing this hydrogen wouldn't just be "carbon free" it would potentially be "carbon negative" at least in terms of it's actual actual impact on climate change which is generally what people mean when they talk about carbon these days.
Hydrogen in out atmosphere is generally not a big problem, so it doesn't get talked about much at all... but if you're going to talk about the greenhouse gasses to install an mining rig... then you are getting into territory where that type of thing is significant.
Trust me, it doesn't take much energy (and therefore not much carbon) to produce a mine to extract more energy. If it did nobody would ever do it.
Water too is a powerful greenhouse gas and burning hydrogen in cars isn't a perfect combustion.
I feel it's lying to call it carbon negative but I can see companies trying to portrait it as lucratively as possible
Damn, you got em
If you come at it from the angle of the equipment used to capture it having a carbon footprint, then that should also apply to equipment doing electrolysis.
That said, what is the level of environmental footprint we're talking about in comparison to electrolysis? We don't know yet, because it's not clear this new source can be economically tapped, but we'll see.
That's a pretty daft conclusion, because JCB has been making Hydrogen machinery for quite some time now and power made for all the equipment on site can also easily be made with hydrogen.
Great. Is hydrogen powered construction and mining equipment common? No. So until it is, my statement stands. Concluding that all equipment is clean because it CAN be is daft.
It's expected to be the cheapest form of electricity soon. It's in the ballpark of natural gas pricing now and prices are falling fast.. while natural gas prices are rising. The long term future has it cheaper than anything except solar/wind... but those two can't easily be stored to be consumed later which is a big logistical win for hydrogen.
So no, it's not common right now. But that's changing. Hydrogen is arguably the most promising area of our efforts to mitigate climate change.
You're going to need a big [citation needed] on that one. The cheapest form of hydrogen right now is produced from natural gas. Where is the gain coming from in using natural gas to make hydrogen to make electricity, as opposed to using natural gas to make electricity?
If it's from expected improvements in making green hydrogen via electrolysis, then you're using electricity to generate hydrogen to generate electricity. That can't be the cheapest form of electricity. It could be the cheapest storage solution to combine with solar and wind (probably not, but it could be), but it makes no sense as a form of electricity in its own right.
Wait, hydrogen? After SWB, you mean.
At some point on the chain of the creation of the renewable energy equipment, carbon releasing and polluting energy and mining was used to create it.
Yup! Let's account for all of it! Seriously! Let's find the optimal lowest carbon solution!
Dog... Do you think there's a lower carbon technique to capture hydrogen than bottling a stream of naturally occurring hydrogen?
Electrolysis requires energy, and it degrades the anodes and cathodes. It generally is used with additives, because pure water isn't conductive.
Pure hydrogen, for free, is as good as it gets. No matter how good our tech gets, this is the closest to a freebee we'll ever get
Carbon taxes would solve so many issues.
Hahabahaba
Right, right. Because they've solved so many already.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p8zAbFKpW0
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=6p8zAbFKpW0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I’d say if you used carbon neutral power to extract it that it would be green.
Hydrogen from electrolysis comes from clean water. You know, the stuff we drink and water our plants with that’s getting more and more difficult to come by? I’d rather not see the oil industry turn water into the new gasoline.
That is incorrect, because salt water electrolysis is a thing - actually so much more efficient even, that they salt fresh water because it takes less energy. Not only that - the plant which I indirectly work for uses grey water. You know, that stuff that you flush down the drain?
Which is great, but I'm sure your plant deionizes the water before using it in the electrolyzers, right? So the water is still being purified, just not by a public water plant.
I hope you are correct, because companies like Cummins are specifying they use “tap water”.
Page 14 point 1.
https://www.cummins.com/sites/default/files/2021-08/cummins-hydrogen-generation-brochure-20210603.pdf
Do you know what you get when you burn hydrogen?
Probably not.
NOx and water vapor. If the hydrogen is not burned correctly, you get more NOx from burning it than you do burning natural gas.
https://www.thechemicalengineer.com/features/hydrogen-the-burning-question/
Luckily fuel cells don’t burn hydrogen.
I wouldn't be too concerned about that. Annual hydrogen production is around 120 billion kg per year, which corresponds to about 1.08 trillion liters of water. We use about 4 quadrillion liters of fresh water total each year.
You need electrolytes (salt) to electrolyze water. Might as well use sea water.
There are plenty of other problems with hydrogen energy, though.
This is not correct. All commercial electrolyzers need very pure water as a feed to the system. PEM and SOEC electrolyzers use the ultrapure (industry term) water directly, while alkaline electrolyzers combine it with potassium hydroxide. Using sea water will very quickly result in non-functional equipment.